Just a short time ago, the idea of an Ivy League psychiatrist privately meeting with members of Congress to convince them that the president is mentally unstable would have been the stuff of crazed conspiracy theories. But that's exactly what Bandy Lee has been doing since early December.

As Politico first reported, Lee, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, briefed roughly a dozen Democratic lawmakers last month on the president’s mental state, which she describes as “dangerous.” Now, more meetings are in the works, and congressional staffers tell me that additional members of Congress are interested in attending.

The fact that so many lawmakers want to hear from Lee may suggest growing interest in removing Trump from office; Lee argues in the briefings that he should undergo a capacity evaluation to assess his fitness for duty. (The Atlantic’s James Hamblin has made a similar argument.) But lawmakers’ interest is notable, even radical, for another reason as well: In defiance of the American Psychiatric Association’s ethical guidelines, Lee is relaying her analysis of the president’s mental health without having ever examined him.

In the wake of Politico’s report, the APA issued a statement reiterating its objection to such public statements by physicians. “We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable-news appearances, books, or in social media,” it read in part. “Armchair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.”

Latest from Politics

Trump’s temperament and leadership style have been the subject of public debate since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015. His detractors have repeatedly argued that he is temperamentally unfit to serve as president. But Lee takes this criticism a significant step further: She argues that Trump may actually be a dangerous person—one who’s shown a “pattern of violent behavior and violent tendencies”—and she’s considered whether the president should be involuntarily committed to a hospital mental-health program. “We can forcibly commit somebody and could be held legally liable if we don’t when the signs are obvious,” Lee told me.

Lee explained that she believes she has a duty to warn the public about what she sees in Trump. She’s been calling for a mental-health evaluation of the president for almost a year. Last April, she organized a coalition of psychiatrists concerned about the presidents capacity, and in October, she published The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Her campaign coincided with public outcry over Trump’s recent tweets about American nuclear capabilities, and the release of Michael Wolff’s new White House exposé, all of which reinvigorated debate over Trump’s disposition and health.

The “pattern of violent behavior” Lee sees in Trump includes his incendiary tweets, his comments about groping women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, his encouragement of violence against protesters at his campaign rallies, and his defense of white nationalists in Charlottesville last summer. She’s told me that Trump currently poses a public-health risk—most of all because of his ability to wage nuclear war unilaterally. His tweet last week about the size of his nuclear button, Lee told me, was a warning “of even the ultimate violence that could annihilate humanity as we know it.”

Some of her colleagues in the medical field believe that Lee and her fellow coalition members are making irresponsible speculation. “These are armchair amateurs who are using their professional standing to profess things that make no real sense,” said Allen Frances, a psychiatrist and the author of Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. “They’ve been taken seriously because they have degrees from fancy universities, and they know something about psychiatric diagnosis.”

Lee argues that she is merely pressing for the president to participate in a capacity evaluation—the same sort of mental-health assessment taken by members of the military—as soon as possible. (Trump will undergo his first official physical on Friday, but a White House spokesman said he will not receive a psychiatric evaluation.) Sitting U.S. presidents aren’t required to take such a test, nor are fitness-for-office exams required to become president. It’s not clear how a test would be put in place, whether Trump would actually take it, and what exactly would happen if Trump were to fail. But Lee told me her role is to educate the public so that people can demand that their lawmakers create a mechanism for evaluation. She suggested they do so “through the 25th Amendment,” but acknowledged “it’s not my area.” The amendment allows for the removal of a president if members of the Cabinet and the vice president decide he isunable to perform his duties.

Frances views Lee as well-meaning but misguided. “The medicalization of politics is always a mistake, and there’s actually no chance that Trump will be removed from office as mentally unfit under [Amendment] 25 of the Constitution,” he told me. “Trump should not be underestimated; he’s crazy like a fox,” Frances said, but “there is clearly nothing substantial to [Lee’s] claims and no reason to believe an evaluation would change anything.”

In our interview, Lee also told me that there are Washington-based doctors and legal groups who’ve said they would be willing to help commit the president involuntarily if they receive concerned reports from the White House that the president is an immediate danger to himself or others. (She declined to name the doctors or legal groups). “Surprisingly, many lawyer groups have actually volunteered, on their own, to file for a court paper to ensure that the [White House security staff would] cooperate with us,” Lee recently toldVox. “But we have declined, since this will really look like a coup, and while we are trying to prevent violence, we don’t wish to incite it through, say, an insurrection.” Lee also claims that “if [a psychiatrist] were to see [the president] on film and he were decompensating”—exhibiting a sharp deterioration—“and no other psychiatrist were stepping forth, then we actually have to step forth, we don’t have a choice, that’s an emergency. A physician has emergency clearance so they should be able to get to the site of emergency.”

According to the Treatment Advocacy Center, in Washington D.C., an emergency psychiatric evaluationcan be ordered by a police officer; an agent of the Department of Mental Health; or a person’s qualified psychologist “who has reason to believe that a person is mentally ill and, because of the illness, is likely to injure himself or others if he is not immediately detained may, without a warrant, take the person into custody.” But it’s not likely that an emergency evaluation—let alone involuntary commitment—would be ordered on hearsay or television evidence alone.

“You’ve got to be kidding. That’s preposterous,” said Jeffrey Lieberman, the chairman of the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry. “What kind of chaos would you have? … That would be anarchy.” The president could hypothetically be compelled to undergo tests under the 25th Amendment, but that would be up to the vice president and the Cabinet—and is not something an independent psychiatrist could instigate, he said.

Even so, the number of congressional Democrats interested in hearing from Lee appears to be growing, though they still constitute a small share of the party’s total representation in Congress. Earlier this week, I contacted the offices of every House and Senate Democrat to find out which lawmakers have already attended the private briefings and which are interested in attending in the future. While the majority of offices didn’t respond, 16 indicated that they are seriously considering the question of Trump’s mental fitness for office, including two who are planning to attend upcoming briefings.

A spokesperson for California Representative Jackie Speier said she is weighing attending a future briefing, and Texas Representative Lloyd Doggett’s office said he plans to meet Lee at the home of Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro later this month. A spokesman told me DeLauro organized a briefing for her colleagues after meeting with Lee last month, in the hopes that “everyone can make up their mind.” And a spokesman for Representative John Garamendi of California confirmed that he met with Lee on Wednesday.

According to Lee, lawmakers have been receptive to her assessment of Trump. “When we actually met with them,” she said, “[the lawmakers] would say, ‘You don’t have to convince me of that. You don’t have to convince any of us of that.’” She added that interest on the Hill has only amplified since last spring, when she held a town hall. “After the April conference, only a handful of lawmakers got in touch to find out more,” she said. But by December, “I was astonished by the level of eagerness to speak with us.”

In total, only three House Democrats I contacted ruled out attending a briefing. Staffers for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told me she wasn’t involved in arranging the sessions and declined to comment further.

While Lee is pushing for a medical evaluation of Trump, other proposals for constraining presidential powers have similarly surfaced in recent months. Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who confirmed that he was one of the dozen to have met with Lee in December, said he has recently seen increased interest in his proposal to create an independent commission to determine presidential capacity. “The framers foresaw a time when this could become an issue,” Raskin told me, referring to the 25th Amendment. “And we simply have to have the courage and sense of responsibility to implement the procedure they set up.”

So far, congressional Republicans haven’t shown the same interest in Lee’s assessment, though she confirmed she’s spoken with some GOP Senate staff. She had one encounter with a Republican senator, but called it “incidental”: She happened to be speaking with the senator’s staffers about Trump when the lawmaker returned from a meeting. Several Republicans told me they simply aren’t interested in the issue. “I’m not particularly fond of the president, but I think this mental-instability talk is bush league,” said one Republican Senate staffer, on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly. “It’s no different than the birther issue. It’s trying to beat a political foe on a technicality rather than at the ballot box.”

Lee told me her concerns have nothing to do with partisanship: “It’s the first time that I’ve jumped into this domain because of medical concern, because of human survival,” she told me, adding that psychiatrists “could be held legally liable if we don’t [speak out] when the signs are obvious.” But in doing so, she’s dived head-first into a decades-long debate within the psychiatric community about their standards and obligations—not to mention a political and constitutional minefield.

Since 1973, the APA’s Principles of Medical Ethics has included the so-called “Goldwater Rule,” which states that it’s unethical for psychiatrists to diagnose a public figure without first examining them personally. The organization recently affirmed its commitment to the policy, and emphasized that offering any professional opinion about an unexamined individual “compromises both the integrity of the psychiatrist and the profession.”

“There’s a consistent pattern to mislabel bad behavior as mental illness and that stigmatizes the mentally ill,” Frances said. “Trump has made amateur diagnosticians of us all.” And Lieberman put it this way: “You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to talk about dangerousness. Everybody can draw their own conclusions when someone says, ‘I’ve got a big nuclear button my desk.’”

Steven Hoge, the director of the Columbia-Cornell Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship Program, was similarly skeptical of Lee’s claims. “Our ability [to predict future violence] is relatively modest,” Hoge explained to me. “It requires extensive evaluation, access to the individual, records of past behavior and past violence.” If someone who hasn’t conducted a one-on-one evaluation of a patient—and doesn’t have access to their medical information or psychiatric history—offers an opinion on their capacity for violence, “that clearly runs afoul of the Goldwater Rule.”

Hoge also questioned whether Lee’s assessment is truly based in science. “The vagueness of ‘violence against the public’ or ‘dangerousness’ masks an underlying political judgment,” he wrote in a follow-up email. If Trump’s actions are legitimate choices for a president to make, Hoge argued, “doesn’t this make clear that the psychiatric prediction is fundamentally a political judgment?” Dinah Miller, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the author of Committed: The Battle Over Involuntary Psychiatric Care, was similarly concerned. “My guess is that if you find Republican psychiatrists, that some of them are going to say he’s doing a good job,” she said.

About the Author

Most Popular

In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.

One evening earlier this spring, German naturalist Norbert Jürgens strayed from his expedition in the Namib Desert. He walked away from his campsite beside Leopard Rock, a huge pile of schist slabs stacked like left-over roofing tiles, and into a vast plain ringed with red-burnished hills. He had 20 minutes of light left before sunset, and he intended to use them.

This next part may sound like a reenactment from a nature documentary, but trust me: This is how it went down.

Off by himself, Jürgens dropped down to his knees. He sank his well-tanned arms in the sand up to the elbows. As he rooted around, he told me later, he had a revelation.

At the time, I was watching from the top of Leopard Rock, which offered a bird’s-eye view of both Jürgens and his expedition’s quarry. Across the plain, seemingly stamped into its dry, stubbly grass, were circles of bare ground, each about the size of an aboveground pool. Jürgens, a professor at the University of Hamburg, was digging—and pondering—in one of these bare patches.

The class divide is already toxic, and is fast becoming unbridgeable. You’re probably part of the problem.

1. The Aristocracy Is Dead …

For about a week every year in my childhood, I was a member of one of America’s fading aristocracies. Sometimes around Christmas, more often on the Fourth of July, my family would take up residence at one of my grandparents’ country clubs in Chicago, Palm Beach, or Asheville, North Carolina. The breakfast buffets were magnificent, and Grandfather was a jovial host, always ready with a familiar story, rarely missing an opportunity for gentle instruction on proper club etiquette. At the age of 11 or 12, I gathered from him, between his puffs of cigar smoke, that we owed our weeks of plenty to Great-Grandfather, Colonel Robert W. Stewart, a Rough Rider with Teddy Roosevelt who made his fortune as the chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana in the 1920s. I was also given to understand that, for reasons traceable to some ancient and incomprehensible dispute, the Rockefellers were the mortal enemies of our clan.

The text reflected not only the president’s signature syntax, but also the clash between his desire for credit and his intuition to walk away.

Donald Trump’s approach to North Korea has always been an intensely personal one—the president contended that his sheer force of will and negotiating prowess would win the day, and rather than use intermediaries, he planned for a face-to-face meeting, with himself and Kim Jong Un on either side of a table.

So Trump’s notice on Thursday that he was canceling the June 12 summit in Singapore was fitting. It arrived in the form of a letter that appears to have been written by the president himself. The missive features a Trumpian mix of non sequiturs, braggadocio, insults, flattery, and half-truths. Whether the dramatic letter marks the end of the current process or is simply a negotiating feint, it matches the soap-operatic series of events that proceeded it. Either way, it displays the ongoing conflict between Trump’s desire for pageantry and credit and his longstanding dictum that one must be willing to walk away from the negotiating table.

The 9-year-old has built a huge following with profane Instagram posts, but the bravado of “the youngest flexer of the century” masks a sadder tale about fame and exploitation.

In mid-February, a mysterious 9-year-old by the name of Lil Tay began blowing up on Instagram.

“This is a message to all y’all broke-ass haters, y’all ain't doing it like Lil Tay,” she shouts as she hops into a red Mercedes, hands full of wads of cash. “This is why all y’all fucking haters hate me, bitch. This shit cost me $200,000. I’m only 9 years old. I don’t got no license, but I still drive this sports car, bitch. Your favorite rapper ain’t even doing it like Lil Tay.”

Referring to herself as “the youngest flexer of the century,” Lil Tay quickly garnered a fan base of millions, including big name YouTubers who saw an opportunity to capitalize on her wild persona. In late January, RiceGum, an extremely influential YouTube personality dedicated an entire roast video to Lil Tay.

A short—and by no means exhaustive—list of the open questions swirling around the president, his campaign, his company, and his family.

President Trump speculated on Tuesday that “if” the FBI placed a spy inside his campaign, that would be one of the greatest scandals in U.S. history. On Wednesday morning on Twitter, the “if” dropped away—and Trump asserted yesterday’s wild surmise as today’s fact. By afternoon, a vast claque of pro-Trump talkers repeated the president’s fantasies and falsehoods in their continuing project to represent Donald Trump as an innocent victim of a malicious conspiracy by the CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice.

The president’s claims are false, but they are not fantasies. They are strategies to fortify the minds of the president’s supporters against the ever-mounting evidence against the president. As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz show in their new book about impeachment, an agitated and committed minority can suffice to protect a president from facing justice for even the most strongly proven criminality.

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. The qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. As one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

The Americans and the North Koreans were all set for a historic meeting. Then they started talking about Libya.

Of all the countries that might have acted as a spoiler for the summit in Singapore between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un—China, Russia, Japan, the United States and North Korea themselves—the one that doomed it was unexpected. It isn’t even involved in North Korea diplomacy and is locateda long 6,000 miles away from the Korean Peninsula. It’s Libya.

Yet Libya ought to have been top of mind. It’s notoriously difficult to determine what motivates the strategic choices and polices of North Korea’s leaders, but among the factors that has been evident for some time is Kim Jong Un’s fear of ending up like Muammar al-Qaddafi. The Libyan strongman was pulled from a drainage pipe and shot to death by his own people following a U.S.-led military intervention during the Arab Spring in 2011. The North Korean government views its development of nuclear weapons—a pursuit Qaddafi abandoned in the early 2000s, when his nuclear program was far less advanced than North Korea’s, in exchange for the easing of sanctions and other promised benefits—as its most reliable shield against a hostile United States that could very easily inflict a similar fate on Kim. We know this because the North Korean government has repeatedly said as much. “The Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the Gaddafi regime in Libya could not escape the fate of destruction after being deprived of their foundations for nuclear development and giving up nuclear programs of their own accord,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency observed in 2016.

The bombastic legal adviser to Stormy Daniels is taking cues from the era of O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky.

On cable news these days, there are very few people who have approached President Trump’s ubiquity. In fact, there is only one, and his name is Michael Avenatti. (Stormy who?)

Avenatti is not the first attorney to understand how the publicity game is played. Litigators are often like this: brash, aggressive, and sophisticated media manipulators. But Avenatti is the first celebrity lawyer of the Trump age, and it’s for that reason that he has become ultra-famous: Everything to do with Trump becomes, for good or ill, a star. And so it is with Avenatti, who in the public imagination has become not just “Stormy Daniels’s lawyer Michael Avenatti,” but simply “Michael Avenatti,” and appears to live inside your TV set.

The billionaire’s Twitter tirade was so ill-informed it led to a subtweet from his former head of communications.

Elon Musk’s screed against the media began with a story about Tesla.

“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” the entrepreneur tweeted Wednesday, with a link to a post on the website Electrek. The author of that post criticized news coverage of recent Tesla crashes and delays in the production of the Model 3, calling it “obsessive” and saying there’s been a “general increase of misleading clickbait.”

Musk followed that tweet with an hours-long tirade in which he suggested that journalists write negative stories about Tesla to get “max clicks” and “earn advertising dollars or get fired,” blamed the press for the election of President Donald Trump, and polled users on whether he should create a website that rates “the core truth” of articles and tracks “the credibility score” of journalists, which he would consider naming Pravda, like the Soviet state-run, propaganda-ridden news agency.

The president sent a terse note to North Korea’s leader, citing “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement.”

It was going to be the first meeting between an American president and a North Korean leader in history—an audacious effort to resolve the crisis over North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons. But on Thursday—after days of bitter back-and-forth between the United States and North Korea over how to approach denuclearization, with a North Korean official threatening a “nuclear-to-nuclear showdown” with the U.S. even as the North Korean government destroyed a nuclear test site as a show of good faith—the White House abruptly announced that the June 12 summit in Singapore would not take place.

The news came in a letter from Donald Trump to Kim Jong Un, the full text of which is here:

Dear Mr. Chairman:

We greatly appreciate your time, patience, and effort with respect to our recent negotiations and discussions relative to a summit long sought by both parties, which was scheduled to take place on June 12 in Singapore. We were informed that the meeting was requested by North Korea, but that to us is totally irrelevant. I was very much looking forward to being there with you. Sadly, based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place. You talk about your nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.

I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters. Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you. In the meantime, I want to thank you for the release of the hostages who are now home with their families. That was a beautiful gesture and was very much appreciated.

If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. The world, and North Korea in particular, has lost a great opportunity for lasting peace and great prosperity and wealth. This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history.